I can believe that for people in his position, of a certain temperament, Google is clearly better, though that doesn't apply to everyone. The main problem with being a STEM professor at a research university is that it's increasingly a sort of freelance "soft money" job: a huge part of your job requirement is chasing down external financing to keep your little ship afloat. Then the other big part is research management: hiring and organizing the research scientists, post-docs, etc. hired with that money, and interfacing with the external stakeholders (keeping DARPA happy, etc.).

Some people are good at and love that, but many researchers aren't and don't, and basically want to be left alone, with some equipment, to do some research with a few collaborators. What Google (and, say MSR) seem to offer senior hires is relative freedom to do research in that style, without having to play the financing/management/PR role of heading up a quasi-freelance research organization.

"on the tenure track anyway"

Might as well say "life in America is pretty great (for the lottery winners anyway)."

@MCM
I included that caveat for two reasons. First, the contingent employee situation in academia is bad and shouldn't be compared to working at Google &c, and second because Terran is talking about the tenure track. TT is hardly a lottery, but like so many things it involves a good deal of luck.

@Mark
Yes, great points.

Academics like to complain because it is their personality type. I don't see many leaving to do construction work or dentistry. Mostly everyone continues to do research, R&D, or occasionally start companies related to their research (such as, for example, Google, which was founded by ex-researchers and does tons of internal research, and which academics also love to complain about in the process of complaining about leaving academia).